As we have covered most of the concepts required to make games using Pygame I won’t be doing any more slideshows instead we will spend all of our time writing games from now on. Today we started to make a very simple Ping Pong game and we will spend another session or two finishing it.

Anybody who has missed a few sessions is always welcome back, but now would be a great time to return as we will be explaining everything from the beginning again.

It’s great that CoderDojo Athenry can sometimes give young people (and parents) the opportunity to learn about and experience leading edge technologies, such as the 3D printer that Cathal Egan demonstrated at CoderDojo Athenry a couple of months ago.

In January 2015, we have another such opportunity, to try out the Oculus Rift. This is a virtual reality headset that combines 3D graphics with movement tracking, to give you the sense of being fully inside a computer generated world. Wearing it, you can look around everywhere, even over your shoulder, to see the world in 3 dimensions in all directions, and you can even move around it.

The Oculus Rift DK2 (Developer Kit 2) is an early stage technology, only available to software developers rather than the general public, but the ideas are likely to have a big impact in the future in areas such as games, entertainment, and education.

Even though we keep the demos to 2 minutes per person, it will take 3 or 4 weeks for all groups to get to try the Oculus out, because we have so many members in CoderDojo Athenry, and it also takes some time to get it set up.

Thanks a million to Ruaidhri in the Minecraft Modders group who owns it!

Thank you all for coming yesterday. To ease ourselves back in we worked on some code for storytelling/conversations. This can add another dimension to any game. It can set the scene or can help with interaction between characters. We used speech bubbles yesterday but you can just as easily record voices instead. It’s all about the timings, you need to get those correct so that each character gets to say their piece.

Next week we are going to take a look at the graphics package PAINT.net. It would be very helpful if most people had it downloaded and installed before next week. The website is http://www.getpaint.net.

Today in the python games group we learned more about moving our sprites. We used the Pygame rotate method to rotate our sprites and we used trigonometry to control our sprites movement. We started working on a ping pong game which we will finish next week. Here is our example code from today and my slides are available here python session_9